Péter Nádas - Parallel Stories

But this was enough for me.

Seeing their fast approach, I lost my self-control and was left with nothing but the will to get away.

I burst into the thicket without looking at what I was stepping into, at what I would come up against.

Branches slapped my face with their metallic-tasting flowers, I bumped against tree trunks, I scraped my skin, under my feet everything crackled, I also heard the sailor’s shouts.

Idiot garbage pail, he shouted into the softly fragrant mute night, and then in an even more mournful tone he yelled that I was a stupid little prick.

You are a big stupid garbage pail.

I did not have to run far to clear the trees, but I couldn’t stop running, I was pounding on the naked earth, clattering on paved and pebbled paths, and making grating noises with my fine, pointed, filthy black shoes.

The sailor was not talking utter nonsense.

The kid from Újpest who thought himself queen of the whole place — he wasn’t just anybody, he wasn’t some unknown person from Újpest whose name just happened to be Pisti.

I felt as if my soul had been stabbed.

I didn’t know by whom.

But I could see with my own eyes that it was indeed Pisti. The sharp pain and disturbing light of this unexpected discovery at least in retrospect illuminated many things I had not understood before.

Running was making my sides hurt because I paid attention to everything except proper breathing, but I kept running, which at least was familiar and felt good.

And then I collapsed and tripped over something, or maybe the other way around. I didn’t know where I was. The grass was dewy; I buried my face in it.

But I felt that something too warm was running down my leg.

On the bed of the maid’s room in the apartment on Pozsonyi Road, neither of them remembered how and when they might finally have fallen asleep, or what had happened between them and when before they fell asleep.

And why they awakened at all in the unfamiliar night, when first they had to find their own limbs in the cooled-off tangle of flesh so that then they could feel the other’s limbs, distinguishing them from their own.

With their senses filled to the brim with each other, this is how they perceived their mutuality, though they did not realize how exceptional this moment was. They couldn’t have named the other person, whose body had soaked up and absorbed every iota of their self-image, and for a good while they remained ignorant of their own names as well. The other person’s intrusive self streamed into the place of their own self-image, just as the other body’s sensation and substance dissolved the shape and sense of their own body. They saw nothing but darkness and only darkness, nothing but darkness, while, submerged in the persona of the other, they sensed they should find their way back to certain characteristics of their own.

They each failed to conjure up their own individual memories.

The window, swinging slowly in a current of air, made squeaky little sounds.

Gyöngyvér spoke first. Quietly yet very excitedly, as if being informed of her own existence by her own strange voice. This surprises her. She still cannot understand herself, because someone else within her is thinking faster or, rather, is thinking ahead of what she will say.

Listen, she said, though she had no idea of another person there or who it might be. Now, listen to me very carefully.

But the other one did not understand the request — neither its content nor who was making it in the dark. The strangely exciting instruction was a mere acoustic experience. He wanted to absorb it, but he had no idea to whom the excitement belonged. A piece of knowledge was missing. As if he were reaching down into a painful darkness where once, a long time ago, all this had already happened. The way pain shoots into well-embedded roots of teeth.

I’ll tell you quickly what I’ve been dreaming, continued the female voice, full of suppressed excitement and whispering from very close up. Listen, please.

As if she were speaking out of the warm inside of the darkness and with this strange voice of hers managing to reach and stroke the cool surface of flesh. But she couldn’t have said whose flesh had cooled and in whose flesh she sensed the voice’s contact.

This time I have it, she exclaimed hoarsely, now I can tell you. Which also made the man wonder — no, alarmed him, he didn’t know — who was this person, within or without him, who either knew or wanted something so much.

And she felt that in the unfriendly outside world her exclamation sounded stupid. How could the other person understand, if she herself had no idea what it was she had. On the contrary, there wasn’t anything, nothing, there were only these cold walls, much too close, this rotten little room. Nothing palpable. After all, I’m dreaming all this. I only feel there’s something I should be able to tell, share with someone, a wish, an empty longing.

She saw all around her a diaphanous yet brilliant and unfamiliar view, glowing with lights, which she had seen before yet could not identify completely with what she was feeling, given the sight before her. Thoughts and objects were incongruous, and so were the objects of her thoughts; everything was a little out of joint. The other one now admitted her into him, or she admitted him into her; she definitely felt this. While with open eyes she observed that they were admitting each other, she saw out from between the disjointed parts, and she found herself alone at the bottom of the water; the water was moving, running, smoothing over her body, carrying it along as if it would tear it apart and rip off her clothes. She was admitted by an enormous, caressing hollowness suffused and seared by the vibrating, glittering, midday summer sun. Something ominous was pulling, dragging her downward, no matter how strongly she protested. She did not protest. She was overwhelmed by happiness. And she could say of this, with absolute certainty, that it wasn’t a dream; she always knew it wasn’t, not a recurring dream. Still, she couldn’t speak of it to the other person because every time she opened her mouth to say something, the water rushed in and she kept having to swallow it.

I don’t know, said the man, and he also didn’t know what it was he didn’t know. I don’t know when we fell asleep. Which sounded a little more like a question than a statement. But he wasn’t certain there was someone else in this darkness, someone he could ask. He had doubts; maybe he was dreaming all this. Or maybe he was dreaming that he was dreaming, and then it would make no sense to ask questions. I can’t, I don’t know what I’m dreaming, he added more loudly.

His own voice made him more awake.

But he couldn’t be sure it was his own voice. Nagging doubt persisted. He found nothing that could convince him of anything.

I think I’ve finally figured it out, listen, I think we’re in a whirlpool.

Well, that’s interesting.

I mean it, a whirlpool, pulling you down, Gyöngyvér continued loudly, almost shouting, which made the other one feel ill at ease. This is a whirlpool, I figured that out, it can’t be anything else. That is to say, I keep on dreaming it again and again, you know, you understand, I keep dreaming that the water is burying me.

And while she was talking, myriad parts of the shining silkiness of the water flooded her, and its enormous weight pressed down on her, and still she managed to speak.

Yet it was gratitude that gathered and hoisted her up from the depths of the water, a feeling that made her float, a feeling that she would carry the other person away within her. Fortunately she didn’t say this aloud. That would have been like announcing that she wanted to drown the other person within her.